10 Movies That Were Supposedly Cursed

Lee Remnick, who plays Katherine Thorn aka mom of the kid Antichrist, falls from a balcony in a scene from "The Omen." 20th Century Fox/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This horror film about the Antichrist appearing as a little boy and inflicting all kinds of satanic mayhem on the people around him was released in 1976. A series of catastrophes surrounded the film's production, leading to the legend of "The Omen" curse.

Any claim that a horror film is cursed should probably be looked at with a skeptical eye. Today it seems to be a standard part of the marketing plan for any horror movie, and tales of this movie's curse do seem to be embellished with unlikely, unprovable details. Still, a lot of terrible things did happen during, not following, production of "The Omen." The movie's macabre subject matter makes it easy for our imaginations to connect the unfortunate events to an evil force working to prevent the film from ever being made.

Where did the curse begin? Actor Gregory Peck's son committed suicide before filming even began. Peck's plane was struck by lightning en route to London, as was a producer's plane. The London hotel where that same producer and others were staying was bombed by the IRA (Irish Republican Army). A planned excursion by some cast and crew to a restaurant was cancelled when the restaurant also was bombed. A plan to hire a private jet for some aerial footage was postponed so a group of businesspeople could use the jet, which crashed on takeoff (in this case, the curse apparently saved some members of the crew). A worker at an animal sanctuary where they filmed was killed by a tiger.

The capstone to the curse was the car crash involving John Richardson, who had designed the special effects for "The Omen," many of them very gruesome. He was in Holland a few months later working on "A Bridge Too Far" when his car was in a head-on crash. He was injured, and assistant Liz Moore was killed by decapitation. Richardson claimed that he awoke to see a road sign in his view showing the distance to the next town down the road. It happened to be the Dutch town of Ommen. The distance was 66.6 kilometers (41.3 miles).